When dealing with Microsoft Exchange restore requests, you will come across three different restore situations:
a database a single mailbox a single mailbox item (mail, calendar entry etc.) Restoring a complete database is not a complicated task, but restoring a single mailbox, or a single mailbox item, is. First, you need to restore the mailbox, that includes the desired mailbox, into a recovery database. Then you can restore the mailbox, or the mailbox items, from the recovery database.
3 days ago, on 13th October 2016, HPE has released patch bundle 9,08 for Data Protector 9. A patch bundle isn’t a directly installable version, instead it’s a bundle of patches and enhancements for a specific version of Data Protector, in this case Data Protector 9.
Beside fixes for discovered problems, a patch bundle includes also enhancements. There are some enhancements in this patch bundle, that have caught my attention particularly.
Recently, a customer has informed me, that copy sessions to encrypted devices failed, after he has made an update to Data Protector 9.07. The copy sessions failed with this error:
|Critical| From: BMA@<hostname> "" Time: <Date><Time> |90:6111| Error retrieving encryption key. The customer uses tape encryption. The destination for the backups is a HPE StoreOnce, and a post-backup copy creates a copy of the data on tape. Backup to disk was running fine, but the copy to tape failed immediately.
Today I got an email from HPE, which has informed me of the imminent end of support for HPE Data Protector 7.0x 8.0x. As of June 30, 2016, HPE will offer no new updates or patches for Data Protector 7.0x and 8.0x. This means that
Telephone and email support new security updates, and new product updates will be phased out. The self-help support will be continued until June 30, 2018. Self-help includes access to the knowledge base, current patches and access to known problems.
Last year in December, I updated the first customer from HPE Data Protector 9.04 to 9.05. Immediately after the first tests I noticed, that backups were made using the NBDSSL transport. I expected that the SAN transport would be used, because the prerequisites were met and it has worked until the update. I opened a case at the HPE support und I was advised to install the hotfix QCIM2A65619. With this hotfix, several files were replaced:
The Virtual Environment Integration (VE Integration) provides protection of VMs in virtual server environments. It is used o integrate HPE Data Protector with various virtualization environments, currently VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. For Citrix XenServer is a script solution available. I will focus on VMware vSphere.
What is possible? I took this table from the “HPE Data Protector 9.00 Integration Guide for Virtualization”.
Feature VE Integration Online backup ✓ Crash-consistent backup ✓ Application-consistent backup ✓ Granularity vmdk, vmx Full/ Incremental/ Differential ✓/ ✓/ ✓ Support for changed block tracking (CBT) ✓ Where does the Data Protector component need to be installed?
Today I had a customer call, where a Exchange 2010 backup repeatedly failed. HPE Data Protector was unable to create a differential or incremental backup. For each database, the following error was logged:
[Minor] From: OB2BAR_E2010_BAR@exchangeserver.domain.tld "MS Exchange 2010+ Server" Time: 21.03.2016 20:00:27 [170:313] One or more copies of database DATABASE are already being backed up in a different session. Interestingly, there was no other backup session running. But the night before, the backup jobs failed because of a network failure.
HPE Data Protector stores multiple backup objects on a single Catalyst store item. A backup object can be a volume, a mount point, a database or a virtual machine. You can have multiple backup objects per backup client. If your filesystem backup job has four backup clients, and each client has two volumes, the backup job will contain 8 backup objects. Another example is a single database of a Microsoft SQL or Oracle database server (instance).
After installing the Data Protector patch bundle 8.13, you may ran into this error when trying to restore data from a HP StoreOnce appliance.
[Normal] From: RSM@dpcm.lab.local "" Time: 04.12.2014 09:13:10 Restore session 2014/12/04-8 started. [Normal] From: RMA@fileserver.lab.local "D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580]" Time: 04.12.2014 09:13:12 STARTING Media Agent "D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580]" [Normal] From: RMA@fileserver.lab.local "D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580]" Time: 04.12.2014 09:13:13 Loading medium from slot 192.168.200.101Store_1257902bf_54796efc_04f4_005c to device D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580] [Major] From: RMA@fileserver.
This applies to upgrades from Data Protector 6.x and 7.x to 8.x and 9.x.
It seems that today is my debugging day… Yesterday I performed a Data Protector update from 7.03 to 8.13. During this update, the Data Protector IDB is migrated to another database format. Last night the backups went smoothly, but today I noticed that two old Detail Catalog Binary File (DCBF) directories were still referenced in the HP Data Protector IDB.
